"Most Promising" Engineer Balances Multiple Roles

Although he carries the titles "software systems engineer"
and "university professor," Brian Blake, Ph.D.
Information Technology '00, is just as proud to be known as "mentor."

That designation, along with his other roles, was a factor that influenced
U.S. Black Engineer & Information Technology Magazine to
name Blake the Most Promising Engineer in Industry in its 2003 Black Engineer
Awards.

Blake is a full-time assistant professor in the Computer Science Department
at Georgetown University and a part-time consultant at The MITRE Corporation,
a nonprofit company that provides systems engineering, research and development,
and information technology support to the U.S. government. He has established
himself as a mentor in those settings as well as at Wakefield High School
in Arlington, Va.

It all began four years ago when Blake was working on his doctorate and
was involved with the Society of Black Engineers' chapter at George Mason.
He and two other classmates approached local high schools to see whether
they would be interested in starting a science and engineering mentoring
program. Wakefield responded enthusiastically.

So, once or twice a month, Blake and his cohorts would take different
problem sets to the mostly black or Hispanic teenagers and help them come
up with solutions while they munched on pizza. "We might say, 'If
you were stuck in the desert with this kind of equipment, what would be
the most useful?' We'd do an egg-drop competition or bring in speakers
to talk about different careers. Getting them interested in technical
degrees was the main goal."

It seems to have worked. At least two of the students eventually applied
to Georgetown, and Blake ran into another student at a George Mason job
fair where Blake was recruiting for MITRE. "It becomes a really small
world," he says with a chuckle.

Blake runs the high school program on his own now, and he has not lost
enthusiasm. The program has been funded year by year with help from George
Mason, Georgetown, and industry, but, wanting more stability, Blake has
applied for a National Science Foundation grant to keep the program going
for the next three or four years. "It's a technical grant for agent
software, so the students can work with it, play with it, learn about
it," he says.

Blake also serves as director of the Minority Mentoring Program at Georgetown,
and he's used his position at MITRE to get his students involved in research
projects there; two of the students were hired by MITRE after they graduated.

When he's not wearing his teaching or mentoring hats, Blake is making
major strides in software engineering research. His Ph.D. dissertation
dealt with distributed systems for workflow. "For example, how do
you get the components to work together if they're at different locations?
The technology makes the components talk together. Later, at MITRE, I
used the same type of technology, the same paradigm. Now, we're looking
to license it and trademark it," he says.

With no plans to take his life off the fast track in the foreseeable
future, Blake hopes to get early tenure at Georgetown. Then he wants to
set up a research lab that will allow him to continue investigating, teaching,
and, of course, mentoring.